J.D. Power made a name listening to customers

Sunday

Sep 22, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Aaron Nicodemus

J.D. Power is coming to Worcester.

First, let me confirm that J.D. Power is, indeed, a real person. James David "Dave" Power III grew up in Worcester and graduated with a liberal arts degree from the College of the Holy Cross in 1953. He is now 82 years old.

After building up J.D. Power & Associates into one of the most trusted names in the automotive industry — carmakers still shout from the mountaintops if their products win a J.D. Power Initial Quality Award — he sold the company in 2005 to The McGraw-Hill Cos. He sits on the board of DealerTrack Technologies, and splits his time between homes in Southern California and Cape Cod.

He was born in Worcester, son of James Power Jr. and Helen Power, and went to St. Peter's High School (now St. Peter-Marian Central Catholic Junior-Senior High School) and then Holy Cross. His daughter, Susan Power Curtin, is a 1993 Holy Cross graduate and a member of the Holy Cross board of trustees. His grandson, J.D. Power V, is a senior at Holy Cross.

Mr. Power will return to his hometown to promote his new book, "POWER: How J.D. Power III Became the Auto Industry's Adviser, Confessor, and Eyewitness to History," and answer questions about his 50-plus-year career. Holy Cross will host "An Evening with J.D. 'Dave' Power III '53," at 7 p.m. Oct. 1 in the Rehm Library.

I will be interviewing him at the event, and he will be available afterward to answer questions and sign copies of the book.

The event, sponsored by the Ciocca Office of Entrepreneurial Studies and the public affairs office at Holy Cross, is free and open to the public.

I asked Mr. Power in an interview last week how Worcester affected his career.

He mentioned his family, particularly his parents and his uncles, and some of the nuns at St. Peter's High School. He also said he sold magazines, worked at several restaurants and the electric company, delivered the Evening Gazette, mowed lawns and shoveled snow. He learned about the value of honest work in Worcester, he said.

The book details Mr. Power's persistence in the face of a seemingly unending series of rejections by automakers foreign and domestic.

Most people would have given up. But he was convinced that the information he was collecting on the consumer experience was more valuable to automakers than it was to consumers.

After all, the buyer couldn't fix a systemic problem with Mazda's rotary engine or Oldsmobile's diesel engine just by complaining about it. But the manufacturer could, if only presented with the fact that the buyers of these cars reported one in five of the engines failed at between 30,000 to 50,000 miles. J.D. Power & Associates' consumer research uncovered both of these problems in the 1970s.

Automakers, who objected to this sort of independent information about their brands being made public, harshly criticized the company. They said J.D. Power was producing flawed data, or had asked the wrong questions. The Big Three American manufacturers objected to the fact that Toyota — J.D. Power's first major client — generally performed well in the J.D. Power surveys. They called J.D. Power a mouthpiece for the Japanese automaker.

Mr. Power responded by opening a bureau in Detroit, the firm's first. The California-based market research firm wanted to show U.S. automakers that J.D. Power & Associates was not out to get them. But J.D. Power employees were met with icy receptions all around the Motor City.

J.D. Power couldn't get its reports to the top people in the auto companies, with few exceptions. So it released the reports to the press, and eventually, top managers were forced to pay attention.

Mr. Power said for years he had a corkboard wall in his office that he filled with handwritten notes from people who filled out satisfaction surveys.

"Some of them had photos, showing where the paint was coming off, or some other problem," he said. "We engaged with those customers; they were willing to talk."

Listening to the customer. It is the bedrock principle on which J.D. Power was founded, one that seems obvious and second-nature in today's marketplace.

But when Dave Power and his late wife, Julie, founded J.D. Power & Associates at their California kitchen table in 1968, it was a novel concept.